So every year I would tell myself that I need to paint the walls and every year I don’t. I’m not sure why this year was different, but yahoo, the walls are now painted! We are now the happy owners of an original mural painted right onto the walls. The patio floor is also kind of painted too but we’ll worry about that when the sukkah comes down.
So really quickly, what we did: I took a red permanent marker (I would have preferred black or at worst, blue, but when the baby only catnaps people who can only find red markers can’t be choosey), took a deep breath and drew on the walls. On the first panel I started with stuff that was hard to mess up – a sun, flowers, a tree and some grass. Another panel has a very unartistic rendition of the walls around the Old City of Jerusalem and another two panels have cartoony pictures of the whole family. Do they look like us? Not at all. Do we care? Not at all. We just drew a little nametag on each person in case we got confused.
Anyway, the next morning, the kids painted it. I forget why there was no school that day – I know it wasn’t a Sunday so I am going to have to assume it was an erev-something or other. Anyway, the boys had a blast painting the pictures and the whole thing came out adorable. I’m really so proud of all of us. And the really best part – I had been praying for a rain-free Sukkot because the paint we used was washable. So of course there was a huge storm with tons of rain, wind, thunder and lightning the first night of Sukkot. (I guess you all can blame the rain on me.) I stood by the back door watching the rain fall into the sukkah for what seemed like forever. I kept waiting for our hard work to be washed away, but woohoo, when it was over, not only was the sukkah still standing, but the mural was too. It’s a Sukkot miracle.